Most of FRT offers standard film criticism, providing
impressionistic readings of various Kieslowski films in regard to
recurring themes, visual motifs, dramatic structures, borrowed
philosophical concepts, and the like. Žižek
also reiterates 1970s argument about how film editing
“sutures” the viewer into the text. I’ll have
almost nothing to say about these stretches of FRT. But
Žižek launches the book with an introduction
and two chapters criticizing arguments made in a collection of
essays edited by myself and Noël Carroll, Post‑Theory:
Reconstructing Film Studies (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1996). The subtitle of Žižek’s book indicates the centrality of what he takes to be the
Post‑Theory movement, even though he doesn’t pursue arguments
about it through the book. Indeed, the first two chapters seem to
me awkwardly welded onto a fairly conventional book of
free-associative film interpretation.

Why invoke Post‑Theory at all, then?

The Preface to FRT by Colin MacCabe explains that he
asked Žižek “to address the weaknesses and
insularity of film studies as they had developed in the
university sector over the previous two decades” (vii). Film
studies, MacCabe feels, has developed a “narrowness and
sterility” (vii).

It’s worth pausing on the ironies here. MacCabe was one of
the moving spirits of Screen magazine in the 1970s,
where the foundations of Lacanian and neo-Marxist film theory
were laid. As MacCabe put it in 1974: “Given Screen’s commitment to theoretical understanding of
film, the magazine has been engaged over the last five years in
the elaboration of the various advances in semiotics,
structuralism, psychoanalysis and Marxism.”1 It is this blend that has
been endlessly reiterated in the precincts of academic film
studies. Across many years, it was the orthodoxy. For many of us,
that trend seemed and still seems “narrow and sterile.”
Judge for yourself, based on this passage signed by MacCabe from
the golden age of Screen:

The problem is to understand the terms of the
construction of the subject and the modalities of the replacement
of this construction in specific signifying practices, where
“replacement” means not merely the repetition of the
place of that construction but also, more difficultly, the
supplacement—the overplacing: supplementation or, in certain
circumstances, supplantation (critical interruption)—of that
construction in the place of its repetition.2

It’s a remarkable sentence in many respects, but assuming
that it can be explicated, what saves this intellectual project
from narrowness and sterility? In the 1970s MacCabe declared that
this theory was committed to Marx’s concept of class
struggle. Exactly how Lacanian psychoanalysis was to assist the
class struggle, and why it should be preferred to other means of
assisting that struggle, was never made clear in Screen.
In any event, MacCabe trots this claim out again as another aim
of Žižek’s book, which
“intervenes” in contemporary debates “without ever
abandoning questions of class struggle and the unconscious” (viii–ix). Once more, neither MacCabe nor Žižek
explains why one cannot be a good socialist without reading
Lacan. (More on this below.)

MacCabe’s objections apply, he says, not to film
historians, who have conducted “vital and important [sic]
work” (vii). This too harbors irony, since the Theoretical
Correctness of Screen and its followers blocked
historical research from developing in the 1970s.
Primary-document history was labeled “empiricist” and
“positivist,” Screen published almost no such
work, and for decades afterward, many historians feared being
attacked for their lack of Grand Theory acumen. Efforts to study
early cinema history, the history of the U.S. film industry, and
the like emerged in quite different venues from the BFI
publications.

Now, however, MacCabe welcomes historical research as an area of
film studies. Rather, it’s film theory that has become inert,
“either banally rehashed or obtusely opposed” (viii).
Though MacCabe isn’t specific, it seems that the obtuse
opposition is incarnated in “ ‘Post‑Theory’ and
cognitivism” (viii). I say “seems” because this is
as close as MacCabe gets to naming names: “For those
followers of fashion who look for a retreat from Marx and Freud,
a hideous mimicking of the threadbare nonsense of the ‘third
way,’ this book will be a grave disappointment” (viii).
Just parsing this cryptic sentence raises questions:

What fashion dictates a retreat from Marx and Freud? One
would think that Post‑Theory was sweeping the academy.
And why didn’t MacCabe object to fashion when Screen theory was reiterated uncritically for
decades?

Presumably MacCabe finds Post‑Theory has parallels with
Tony Blair and New Labour’s “Third Way.”3 What are these
affinities? What grounds can MacCabe have for linking ideas
about cinema floated by Midwest college professors to a crisis
in British politics, let alone finding the parallels
“hideous”?

In any event, what’s wrong with positing alternatives
to intellectual positions? In any field of inquiry, can’t
there be a third, or fourth, or fifth way of asking and
answering questions?

Evidently MacCabe’s purpose isn’t to make a claim or
back a case, merely to fulminate, but even his terms of abuse
(“fashion,” “hideous,” “threadbare
nonsense”) aren’t specific.

Apart from reviving the allegiance of Lacan and class
struggle, MacCabe says, “Žižek’s
account of Post‑Theory lays bare both its obvious fallacies and
its more hidden vanities” (ix). On the contrary. Although
MacCabe designated Žižek his hitman, it’s
more than a little surprising to find that at nearly every
opportunity Žižek doesn’t engage with the
substantive arguments of Post‑Theory at all.

Prince and Bordwell: Žižek’s
Missed Chances

There are three essays in the anthology that directly
criticize the psychoanalytic project in film theory: Stephen Prince’s “Psychoanalytic Film Theory and the Problem of
the Missing Spectator”; my “Contemporary Film Studies
and the Vicissitudes of Grand Theory”; and Noël Carroll’s “Prospects for Film Theory: A Personal
Assessment.” How does Žižek address the
challenges these essays propose?

His chief strategy consists of invective and rhetorical
questions. “Does what [the Post‑Theory attacks]
describe as Theory, or what they attribute to Theory, not read as
a comically simplified caricature of Lacan, Althusser et al? Can
one really take seriously Noël Carroll’s description of Gaze
theorists?” (4). Žižek takes you no
further. No argument, no evidence, just dismissal à la MacCabe.
Then, Žižek asks, who are the
“Lacanians” referred to in Post‑Theory?
“Except for Joan Copjec, myself, and some of my Slovene
colleagues, I know of no cinema theorist who effectively accepts
Lacan as his or her ultimate background” (2). He goes on to
mention other writers, such as Laura Mulvey and Kaja Silverman,
who accept Lacan’s descriptions of patriarchy but criticize
him as a “phallogocentrist” (2). What’s odd here is
that Carroll, Prince, and I don’t attack
“Lacanians”; the phrase is not to be found in our
essays. Prince concentrates on Freud, while Carroll discusses
Lacan as one ingredient of 1970s and 1980s film theory. My essay
emphasizes what I call subject-position theory, of which Lacanian
doctrines form only part. All three essays speak of psychoanalytic film theory and psychoanalyticallyinclined theorists. To use a
term Žižek employs often in FRT, one
might say that the Lacanians in these essays exist only as his
phantasms. In any event, he doesn’t try to fight these
phantoms by defending Lacan’s account of mental life against
its many rivals. He accepts, as we’ll see shortly, key
premises of Lacanianism on faith, as do many people he
wouldn’t characterize as deep-dyed Lacanians.

Žižek’s complaints about lumping Lacanians
together diverts our attention from the point at issue. Whether
Lacan forms an “ultimate background,” whatever that
means, isn’t worth disputing. Žižek knows
perfectly well that a great many film scholars have cited Lacan
and used his work to bolster theoretical or interpretive claims.
Although the three essays invoke many writers by name (and my
essay analyzes one essay by the Žižek-endorsed
Lacanian Copjec), the crucial issue is the role Lacan’s
theories play within the intellectual doctrines of contemporary
film theory. This Žižek doesn’t address.

Once we get past rhetorical questions and diversionary
tactics, Žižek is given an excellent
opportunity to engage with Post‑Theory by Stephen Prince’s essay. Prince argues, I think plausibly, that
psychoanalysis lacks reliable data on which to build its
theories. Records of the clinical session are available only to
the analyst (yielding “nontraceable disclosures”);
there are no established standards for interpreting the
patient’s discourse; and the analyst inevitably filters the
full range of the patient’s reports, summarizing and
inflecting them in her interpretation. Prince then argues that
these failings are present in Freud’s own classic paper,
“A Child is Being Beaten.” Prince goes on to suggest
that psychoanalytic theory of cinema is at a disadvantage because
of its weak account of perception and its resolute ignoral of the
ways in which cinema resembles the world, both of which can be
better accounted for by rival theories.

There are many things Žižek (and MacCabe,
the book’s patron) would object to here. But
Žižek never discusses any of them. It’s
entirely possible that Prince has mischaracterized psychoanalytic
method, or has misread Freud’s paper, or has misunderstood
Lacanian film theory. But Žižek doesn’t
make any effort to show weaknesses in the essay. He merely mocks
the title (p. 1).

Likewise, you’d think that he’d slice my essay to
ribbons. “Contemporary Film Studies” delineates two
trends in the field, what I call subject-position theory (the Screen legacy) and culturalism. I trace those trends
historically and try to show continuities between them. The
conceptual continuities I argue for involve social
constructivism, theories of subjectivity, the centrality of
identification, and an underlying commitment to semiotics. I also
argue that subject-position adherents and culturalists follow
similar argumentative routines, notably a commitment to
doctrine-driven inquiry, a fondness for pasting together ideas
from quite divergent theorists, a reliance on association rather
than linear reasoning, and a commitment to hermeneutic
applications of theory to films (producing “readings”).
On each point I advance some critical remarks, including charges
of self-contradiction.

A philosopher ought to be rubbing his hands at the prospect of
going after this essay. I could be vulnerable from many angles.
Žižek could attack my characterization of
Freud, Lacan, and the rest; my critiques of same; and above all
my outline of the two trends. Most important, although I
didn’t have Žižek in mind when I wrote the
essay, he himself instantiates all the conceptual commitments and
rhetorical habits I criticize. His work is a pastiche of many,
widely varying intellectual sources (from Ernest Laclau to
Stephen Jay Gould). He is an associationist par excellence. His
use of films is purely hermeneutic, with each film playing out
allegories of theoretical doctrines. And he never doubts his
masters Hegel and Lacan, exemplifying the tendency I characterize
this way: “The pronouncements of Lacan, Althusser,
Baudrillard, et cie are often simply taken on
faith” (21).

So my complaints should strike very close to home. Yet not a
peep from Žižek on any of these points. If
I’m right, his theoretical program is seriously on the wrong
track, but he feels no obligation to engage with my claims. This
isn’t the thinker MacCabe says is “determined to follow
the logic of any concept or text through to its bitter or sweet
end” (FRT, viii).4

Carroll and Žižek 1: Reply as
Confirmation

Žižek is a philosopher, so perhaps we’d
expect him to engage most fully with another of his profession.
Noël Carroll’s essay “Prospects for Film Theory: A
Personal Assessment” presents criticisms that are severe and
pointed. Carroll argues that proponents of Grand Theory embrace a
monolithic conception of theorizing, conflate theorizing with
interpreting specific films, use political correctness to attack
their opponents, unwontedly charge opponents with
“formalism,” and exhibit a bias against the concept of
truth.

Remarkably, Žižek responds to not a single
one of these charges. He doesn’t, contra MacCabe,
lay bare any fallacies, nor does he mount what he promises in his
introduction will be a “critical dialogue with cognitivist/historicist Post‑Theory” (7). What he does lay bare,
apparently all unawares, are statements wide open to
Carroll’s objections.

Here is Carroll:

Proponents of the Theory let on that the Theory
grew out of the student movement and out of a resistance to
oppression everywhere. Consequently, from their point of view,
criticism of the Theory virtually represents a clear and present
danger to the very Revolution itself. Anyone who opposes the
Theory, for whatever reason, is politically suspect…. Criticisms
of the dubious psychoanalytic premises of the Theory are
denounced as reactionary—in a political sense!—as if a belief in
the equality of races requires assent to Lacan and the rest of
the pet paraphernalia of the Theory…. (45).

MacCabe’s evocation of the class struggle in his
introduction strikes this note, as does
Žižek’s promise to show how
Kieslowski’s work, “the site of antagonistic ideological
tensions [sic], of the ‘class struggle in art’, can be
redeemed by a Lacanian approach” (7).

Žižek begins his book by saying that the
Post‑Theory trend is “often sustained by a stance of
profound political resignation, by a will to obliterate the
traces and disappointments of political engagement” (13).
The one piece of evidence he supplies for this is startlingly
shaky. Žižek takes the scholar Ben Brewster as
“emblematic of the present-day state of cinema theory” (13). Why? Because Brewster shifted from being a proponent of Screen theory to becoming a film historian displaying an
“exclusive preoccupation with pre‑1917 cinema” (13).
Why does this matter? Because Brewster focuses on a period
“prior to the October Revolution, as if to emphasise the
will to obliterate the trauma of the failed leftist involvement
in Theory” (13). About Žižek’s
diagnosis that Brewster’s research constitutes a form of
fetishistic disavowal reminiscent of a reluctance to look at
feminine genitals, I shall say nothing. I just want to point out
that Brewster has not restricted his research to cinema
before 1917, not even in the book Žižek
mentions in a footnote,5 so the tenuous thread of association fails even
as a literary conceit. On its first page, FRT presents a
strained reach for cleverness at the expense of nuance and
accuracy. We’ll encounter this strategy again.

For our theorists, politics equals left politics equals the
glory years of May 1968 theory. Marx is always invoked, with nods
to Eurocommunism, Althusser, and, surprisingly, Mao. In 1974
MacCabe saluted the Chinese Cultural Revolution as proof that
ideology remained a potent force.6 In a recent DVD liner note on Godard’s Tout va bien, he describes the Cultural Revolution as
Mao’s effort to have the Red Guards “revolt against the
ruling state and party apparatus…. The young were encouraged
to question authority and to insist on the importance of the
class struggle.”7 MacCabe doesn’t mention that Mao stirred up
the young in order to regain his power over that same party
apparatus, or that the Red Guards were not encouraged to question his authority, or that the ten years of Cultural
Revolution shut down China’s education, exiled intellectuals
to labor camps, destroyed centuries of cultural artifacts, killed
hundeds of thousands of people, and ruined the lives of millions
more. Žižek also invokes the Great Helmsman:
“To put it in good old Maoist terms, the principal
contradiction of today’s cinema studies…. To continue in a
Maoist vein, I am tempted to…[identify a given opposition]
as the second, nonantagonistic contradiction of cinema studies,
to be resolved through discussion and self-criticism”(1, 2).
Needless to say, why Maoism is good as well as old doesn’t
concern Žižek—perhaps because, like many of his
other citations, this tip of the hat to the cult of personality
serves merely as an effort at knowing rhetoric. Certainly
self-criticism doesn’t enter his text.

So Carroll’s diagnosis—that theoretical sallies are often
justified by an unwarranted link to a particular brand of
politics—is borne out by the very book seeking to demolish
Carroll’s views. Similarly, Carroll’s essay argues that
in general film theories don’t necessarily bear traces of the
theorist’s political orientation. “I have evolved
theories of movie music and point-of-view editing, but they do
not, in any sense that could be called logical, imply my
political position about anything from gun control, to sexual
harassment, to communal ownership of the means of
production” (46). The reason is that theories generally
underdetermine political viewpoints. “Given theories may be
espoused by either the forces of light or the forces of
darkness” (47). We might expect this to arouse a sustained
critique from Žižek, who obviously doesn’t
believe in the underdetermination of theories; but no such luck.
He remains silent.

Under its aegis, the film theorist sets out to
subsume every aspect of cinematic phenomena under the putative
laws and categories of his or her minimally customized version of
the reigning orthodoxy. Theorizing becomes the routine
application of some larger, unified theory to questions of
cinema, which procedure unsurprisingly churns out roughly the
same answers, or remarkably similar answers, in every case. The
net result, in short, is theoretical impoverishment (41).

And here is Žižek, claiming that
Post‑Theory

…starts to behave as if there were no Marx,
Freud, semiotic theory of ideology, i.e. as if we can magically
return to some kind of naivete before things like the
unconscious, the overdetermination of our lives by the decentred
symbolic processes, and so forth became part of our theoretical
awareness (14).

Žižek can’t entertain the prospect that
ideas can be “part of our theoretical awareness” and
still be invalid. Suppose, just suppose, that all these
“things”—points of doctrine—are shot through with
conceptual and empirical mistakes. This is what Prince, Carroll,
and I are saying. We don’t ignore this theory; we criticize
it. Being skeptical about weak theories isn’t a return to
innocence. It’s an advance; it can cast out error. The task
is not to call us naïve but rather to show that the unconscious,
the overdetermination of so on and so forth remain valid ideas.
The way to show this is not by waxing nostalgic for the days when
everyone read Althusser, but by overcoming our criticisms. Yet in
Žižek’s hands, confirming Carroll’s
objections once more, Lacanian theory functions as a set of
axioms or dogmas rather than working ideas to be subjected to
critical discussion.

Post‑Theory argues against the very idea of Theory
and supports the idea of theories and theorizing (p. xiv). Theories operate at many
levels of generality and tackle many different questions. Theorizing is a process of proposing, refining,
correcting, and perhaps rejecting answers, in the context of a
multidisciplinary conversation. But for Žižek,
the unconscious, the overdetermination of our lives, and all the
rest is Theory entire and whole. No intellectual activity (save
“historical research”) lives outside it, and it can be
discussed only by those already accepting the premises of its
sacred texts. And once the only correct Theory is packaged with
the only correct political attitudes, you have a powerful weapon
against anyone who differs. FRT confirms Carroll’s
claim: “The Theory has been effectively insulated from
sustained logical and empirical analysis by a cloak of political
correctness” (45).

Carroll and Žižek 2: Dialectics of
Inquiry and of Nature

Žižek ignores almost all the substantive
points Carroll makes in his essay. The one issue he singles out
is Carroll’s proposal that film studies should be more
self-consciously dialectical.

Carroll explains at several points what he means by this. In
his sense, dialectics is an alternative to the method
Žižek embraces, that of deriving a film theory
from axioms or first principles. Instead, dialectical exchange is
a form of debate, “defending one’s own theory by
demonstrating that it succeeds where alternative theories
falter” (56). More extensively:

Theories are framed in specific historical
contexts of research for the purpose of answering certain
questions, and the relative strengths of theories are assayed by
comparing the answers they afford to the answers proposed by
alternative theories. This conception of theory evaluation is
pragmatic because: (1) it compares actual, existing rival answers
to the questions at hand (rather than every logically conceivable
answer); and (2) because it focuses on solutions to contextually
motivated theoretical problems (rather than searching for answers
to any conceivable question one might have about cinema) (56).

Žižek does object to Carroll’s point,
but he misconstrues it. He says that this conception of
dialectics is “simply the notion of cognition as the gradual
progress of our always limited knowledge through the testing of
specific hypotheses” (14). Now this is plainly not what the
passage quoted above says. Žižek eliminates the
communal and comparative dimensions of inquiry Carroll invokes,
and introduces “the testing of specific hypotheses.” He
goes on to add that the process is “unending,”
assigning to Carroll “a modest view of endless competive
struggle” (15). But again, Carroll does not say that the
process is infinite. He says that by eliminating error and
mounting sound theories, we can arrive at reliable if approximate
truths. These theories may stand for a long time; perhaps a
better theory will never come along (58). “There is no
reason to concede that we cannot also craft film theories in the
here and now that are approximately true” (58). There is
nothing inherently unending about this process.

So Žižek has misunderstood Carroll’s
conception of dialectical inquiry. But that’s not all. Having
rewritten Carroll’s claims, Žižek blurts
out: “Well, if this is dialectics, then Karl Popper, the
most aggressive and dismissive critic of Hegel, was the greatest
dialectician of them all!” (15). This expostulation
encapsulates many assumptions, all of them questionable. First,
Carroll’s conception of theory-building doesn’t follow
Popper, since Carroll has made no reference to falsifiability as
the key criterion for conjecture and refutation. Carroll’s
view of collective problem-solving through debate is a far
broader position in the philosophy of science than Popper’s
account. Secondly, as Carroll points out in a subsequent version
of his essay, “an unbiased examination of the history of
philosophy will show, I believe, that Hegel has no patent on
dialectics.”8 I’d go further and observe that the concept
of dialectic derives from ancient Greece, and it simply means
“conversing.” Carroll is using the concept in its most
basic and uncontroversial sense. Žižek could
have distinguished Carroll’s use from that of other thinkers,
notably Hegel, but that would require a careful and painstaking
response, not a cri de cœur. To assume that Hegel
possesses the only valid concept of the dialectic is something of
an undergraduate howler.

Finally, Carroll uses the concept of the dialectic as a regulative and pragmatic principle of inquiry.
Žižek, like Hegel, believes that the dialectic
also exists in the world, as a constitutive principle of
nature, society, and indeed being itself. Thus
Žižek says that there is a dialectic informing
the history of film style (pp. 22–25). In this way, a particular
version of dialectical inquiry is justified by an ontological
assumption. Žižek brooks no dispute on this:
again and again he refers to the “proper” use of
dialectics—the one forged by Hegel and, mysteriously, Freud (25).
But he nowhere defends Hegel’s idea of dialectic against the
hosts of objections that have been raised by over a century of
critics; nor does he defend his somewhat idiosyncratic version of
Hegel.9 Another philosophical slip—Žižek confuses
epistemic criteria with ontological ones—and another moment at
which a canonical thinker becomes a security blanket.

Žižek has one more cluster of objections to
Carroll’s conception of dialectical theory-building.
“Dialectics proper,” he says, is distinguished by
“the way the subject’s position of enunciation is
included, inscribed into the process: the cognitivist speaks from
the safe position of the excluded observer who knows the
relativity and limitation of all human knowledge, including his
own” (15). These are presumably the “hidden
vanities” to which MacCabe alludes. The easy answer to this
claim is this: Žižek uses enunciation theory as
the basis for his objection. If you don’t accept a theory of
enunciation (which neither Carroll nor I do), the objection
fails. (Note, in passing, Žižek’s
invocation of enunciation theory rests upon the oft-cited liar
paradox: the semantic contradiction involved in saying “I am
lying” supposedly exemplifies split subjectivity in all of
language.) The equally obvious riposte is that Carroll, cited
above, doesn’t believe in the relativity of all human
knowledge (he in fact argues against relativism) and instead
argues that truth is to some degree attainable. Once more
Žižek has misunderstood the claims he’s
criticizing.

Žižek goes on to create a sort of
theoretical ad hominem. Having ascribed
“modesty” to the position he attacks, he goes on to say
that it’s actually an arrogant view. But he does this by
again caricaturing the claims. “When I say, ‘The theory
(which I am deploying) is just an impotent mental construct,
while real life persists outside,’ or engage in similar modes
of referring to the wealth of pre-theoretical experience, the
apparent modesty of such statements harbours the arrogant
position of enunciation of the subject who assumes the capacity
to compare a theory with ‘real life’” (15). In
passing, I note that Žižek here seems to equate
the subject with an entity like an individual, capable of actions
like assuming; but this is a philosophical error, as I point out
in my Post‑Theory contribution (14–15). Also in passing,
I note that until Žižek shows that enunciation
theory is a plausible account of language or mental activity, his
diagnosis, which wholly depends on this theory, need cause me no
worries. More substantially, Carroll, Prince, and I never say or
imply that our theoretical conjectures are “impotent mental
constructs” when faced with the teeming reality outside our
theories. Where does he get this stuff?

And what’s so arrogant about comparing a theory with real
life? Žižek does it all the time. Consider this
passage from an interview, in which Žižek is
asked about his fondness for Lenin’s theories:

What I like in Lenin is precisely what scares
people about him-the ruthless will to discard all prejudices. Why
not violence? Horrible as it may sound, I think it’s a useful
antidote to all the aseptic, frustrating, politically correct
pacifism.

Let’s take the campaign against smoking in the U.S. I think
this is a much more suspicious phenomenon than it appears to be.

If Žižek can apply Leninist politics of
violence to anti-smoking legislation (will he found a Cheka to
purge nonsmokers?), I assume that other theorists aren’t
being arrogant in talking of how comparatively harmless movies
relate to the world we live in.

Dialogue versus Monologue

Throughout Žižek’s objections to
Carroll’s notion of dialectical inquiry, one blind spot is
evident. In his references to “testing hypotheses” and
the isolated “subject of enunciation,” in his accounts
of dialectical thinking by the solitary theorist, he ignores the
intersubjective dimension of theorizing. Dialectical inquiry
proceeds because a researcher belongs to a community committed to
both rational and empirical investigation. Whatever one’s
personal feelings about people arguing against you, the
regulative ideal of a research community is respect for
argumentation and evidence. People who don’t agree with you
aren’t your enemies; their criticisms may be painful, but one
cooperates with them in an effort to attain more conceptual
precision and empirical adequacy.

Yet consider what Žižek claims in another
book, in commenting on an essay in Post‑Theory:

Lenin liked to point out that one could often
get crucial insights into one’s own weaknesses from the
perception of intelligent enemies. So, since the current essay
attempts a Lacanian reading of David Lynch’s Lost Highway, it may be useful to start with a reference to
“Post‑Theory,” the recent cognitivist orientation of
cinema studies that establishes its identity by a thorough
rejection of Lacanian cinema studies.10

Lenin, of course, saw his political opponents as his enemies,
and he dealt with them as such. But to characterize one’s
intellectual opponents this way is revealing of
Žižek’s attitude toward debate. One
doesn’t cooperate with enemies.

Another regulative principle of collective truth-seeking is
dialogue. Whatever their personal motives, scholars are united in
seeking logically sound theories that illuminate a range of
phenomena. That’s what allows debate to flourish. When the
community norms flag, debate withers and theory becomes a chorus
of monologues. Arguably, though, Žižek fails to
grasp the intersubjective dimension of theorizing because he
doesn’t believe in theory as a conversation within a
community, a process of question and answer and rebuttal. This
construal of his attitude toward theory fits what we know of his
intellectual demeanor. Consider these reports from an admiring
journalist:11

Bearded, disheveled, and loud…Barely
pausing to sit down, Žižek launches into a
monologue so learned and amusing that it could very well
appear—verbatim—in one of the many books he has written (42).

“Discussing Hegel and Lacan is like breathing for Slavoj.
I’ve seen him talk about theory for four hours straight
without flagging,” says UC–Berkeley’s Judith Butler.
When not mediated by the printed page, however, the
obsessive-compulsive quality that makes his hyperkinetic prose so
exhilarating is somewhat overwhelming—even, evidently, for
Žižek himself. Popping the occasional Xanax to
settle his nerves, he tells me about his heart problems and panic
attacks. As his eyes dart around the room and his manic monologue
becomes more frantic, I fear that I may be his last interviewer.
Žižek is like a performance artist who is
terrified of abandoning the stage; once he starts talking, he
seems unable to stop (42).

Žižek has developed an elaborate set of
psychological tricks to manipulate his American students and
enable him to have as little contact with them as possible. At
the first meeting of each course, he announces that all students
will get an A and should write a final paper only if they want
to. “I terrorize them by creating a situation where they
have no excuse for giving me a paper unless they think it is
really good. This scares them so much, that out of forty
students, I will get only a few papers,” he says. “And
I get away with this because they attribute it to my
‘European eccentricity.’ ”

Žižek says that he deals with student inquiries
in a similar spirit. “I understand I have to take questions
during my lectures, since this is America and everybody is
allowed to talk about everything. But when it comes to office
hours, I have perfected a whole set of strategies for how to
block this,” he says with a smirk. “The real trick,
however, is to minimize their access to me and simultaneously
appear to be even more democratic!” Initially,
Žižek scheduled office hours immediately before
class so that students could not run on indefinitely. Then he
came up with the idea of requiring them to submit a written
question in advance, on the assumption that most would be too
lazy to do it (they were). Žižek reserves what
he calls “the nasty strategy” for large lecture classes
in which the students often don’t know one another. “I
divide the time into six twenty-minute periods and then fill in
the slots with invented names. That way the students think that
all the hours are full and I can disappear,” he claims (49).

There’s a lot to digest here—particularly the rich image
of a theorist who pronounces on all things political, historical,
aesthetic, and psychological criticizing Americans for being
“allowed to talk about everything”—but you don’t
need to be either a cognitivist or a psychoanalyst to hazard one
conclusion. An insistent monologist and a teacher confessing
himself uninterested in student response might not be able to
appreciate the community-driven nature of inquiry postulated by Post‑Theory.

This, then, is what Žižek’s
“critical dialogue” with Post‑Theory amounts
to. Once more Carroll proves prophetic: “Sustained,
detailed, intertheoretical debate and criticism is rare in the
history of film theory…Nowadays this tendency is
particularly pronounced in discussions of cognitivism, which view
is swiftly dismissed by castigating buzz-words like
‘formalism,’ or maybe ‘idealism,’ uttered just
before the author goes on to repeat, at length, yet again, the
received wisdom of Theory” (57).

Some final comments

Žižek obviously thinks that he has engaged
in a critical dialogue, and he’s not alone. A review12 of FRT praises Žižek as “formidably
well-read,” a “subtle theorist” able to operate
“at the highest levels of psychological and philosophical
abstraction.” The book offers, in the reviewer’s
opinion, “A mode of aesthetic analysis that fully describes
the most spectral and intangible [sic] of film without
compromising the underlying theoretical rigor.” Everything
I’ve said so far indicates that I can’t agree. Where are
the subtleties? Where is the rigor? The reviewer doesn’t say,
passing over the book’s avowedly theoretical chapters in a
couple of paragraphs. Perhaps the reviewer accepts
Žižek’s own conception of Post‑Theory. The reviewer says that
Žižek’s “fierce critique” rests
on the idea that Post‑Theory “attempts to move away
from a reliance on theory and back toward more empirical accounts
of film.” Since anyone who read Post‑Theory would
understand that we plead for better theories, not the elimination
of theoretical work, I have to conclude that the reviewer relies
on Žižek’s characterization of the
book’s project. And this is a mistake, for
Žižek makes several errors.

First, he claims that the Post‑Theory collection is
“a kind of manifesto” of cognitive film theory.13 This flies in
the face of the introduction to Post‑Theory, where
Carroll and I say, “It needs to be stressed that though a
number of the articles in this volume are cognitivist, the volume
itself is not a primer in cognitivism…. The unifying
principle in this book is that all the research included
exemplifies the possibility of scholarship that is not reliant
upon the psychoanalytic framework that dominates film academia (xvi).” Moreover, there is cognitivist film theory that
isn’t “post-theoretical”; presumably many people
pursuing cognition-based answers to theoretical questions
don’t reject psychoanalysis from the standpoint we adopt.
Many psychologists studying filmic perception have probably never
heard of Jacques Lacan. I conclude that Žižek
uses the term “Post‑Theory” to sum up a broad movement
he takes to be emerging within film studies as the principal
rival to the psychoanalytic (specifically, Lacanian) paradigm.
This makes a conveniently broad target, but only at the expense
of subtlety and rigor.

When Žižek treats the Post‑Theory movement
as “the cognitivist and/or historicist reaction” to
Grand Theory (FRT, 1), he displays a second confusion.
To call the historical essays collected in Post‑Theory “historicist” is at best ambiguous. In the relevant
sense, historicism involves the belief that concepts held by
historical agents at a given time are sui generis and can’t
be unproblematically translated into terms available at the
historian’s moment. For example, Foucault’s position in
“What Is an Author?” can be described as historicist.
He posits that the modern concept of the author came into
existence at a particular time and place and can’t be
presumed to operate in earlier circumstances. But historicism in
this sense plainly isn’t advocated or even presupposed by the
historians in the Post‑Theory collection; their essays
don’t take a position on this issue. Of course it’s
possible that Žižek simply means to indicate
that the essays are historical studies; but then he’s
misusing the term “historicism.” As a philosopher,
Žižek should be committed to clarifying terms
rather than fogging them.

At some point someone is likely to say that
Žižek is elusive because he’s playful. His
flights of fancy try to get you to think outside the box;
he’s a provocateur. I suppose this comes down to taste, but I
find Žižek not provocative at all. Praising
Lacan, Lenin, and Mao seems to me not rebellion but a retread.
And we come at some point to a matter of sincerity. When is he
not being playful? When is he putting forth a claim he’s
committed to?

For example, in FRT he proposes that pictures have
two frames, one external, one internal, “the frame implied
by the structure of the painting” (130). “These two
frames by definition never overlap” (130).14 Yet in his prologue,
Žižek explains that at a conference, asked to
comment on a picture, he “engaged in a total bluff” (5)
by positing the existence of these two frames. He goes on to make
fun of people who took it seriously:

To my surprise, this brief intervention was a
huge success, and many following participants referred to the
dimension in-between-the-two-frames, elevating it into a term.
This very success made me sad, really sad. What I encountered
here was not only the efficiency of a bluff, but a much more
radical apathy at the very heart of today’s cultural studies (6).

The postmodern emperor doesn’t need a child in the crowd
to point out his nakedness; he does so himself, and mourns the
fact that he fooled so many. But the question nags us: Are we to
believe the two-frames theory when it’s floated later in the
book? Evidently not, since it’s admittedly a bluff. But
perhaps Žižek really believes the
theory, so that in the prologue, when he says that his theory is
a bluff, he’s bluffing. This compels us to ask: Might not
everything he says about Lacan, Post‑Theory, and the rest be a
bluff akin to the two-frames bluff? No wonder
Žižek takes the Liar’s Paradox to be the
prototype of language use.

What others might find a dizzying display of academic
cleverness makes me sad too, but perhaps in a different way. Are
we wasting our time in expecting Žižek to offer
reasonable arguments? Fundamental questions of responsibility
arise here, especially in relation to a writer not hesitant to
condemn the beliefs and actions of others. It’s tedious to be
lectured on morality and ethics from someone who casually
announces petty acts of deceit, like sneaking out of office hours
or fooling gullible academics who are eager to take a
master’s every word as a revelation.

“Well,” Žižek or a sympathetic
reviewer might ask me, “can’t we say that he engages
seriously and straightforwardly with your claims? He has
much to say about your book, On the History of Film Style and your claims about contingent universals in one
essay of Post‑Theory.” He does indeed. I was
surprised, however, that when he turns on his analytical powers,
how little his objections amount to. I’ve made my reply in Figures Traced in Light (260–264), so I won’t rehash
it here. I think I show that when Žižek tries
to be serious and dismantle an argument critically, the results
are vague, digressive, equivocal, contradictory, and either
obviously inaccurate or merely banal. This might explain why he
so seldom tries to be analytical. Vagueness, digressions,
equivocations, etc. are less apparent if you’re playful.

But we can forgive all this, others will reply, because
Žižek is such a lively writer. Recall that
Boynton, above, calls his prose “hyperkinetic” and
“exhilarating,” and names him “a dazzlingly acute
thinker and prose stylist.” Frankly, I can’t imagine
Boynton and I are reading the same writer. As with many
contemporary theorists, Žižek’s dominant
register is what Frederick Crews has called ponderous
coyness.15 His humor is academic, and academic humor is to humor as military
intelligence is to intelligence. As for the texture of the prose,
try to find the acuteness and hyperkinesis here:

The underlying principle and support of this
thesis of the symbolic order is that, in each field of meaning,
if this field is to be ‘totalised,’ there has to be an
additional/excessive signifier which, as it were, gives a
positive figure to that which cannot be properly included into
this field, somewhat like Spinoza’s well-known criticism of
the traditional personalized notion of God: at the point at which
our positive knowledge of the causal links fails, we supplement
this lack with the idea of ‘God,’ which, instead of
providing a precise idea of a cause, just fills in the lack of
this idea. (FRT, 64–65).

Not only is this an obscure and pretentious way of recycling a
familiar post-Structuralist idea, the sentences aren’t
minimally well-written. (I grant that “as it were” is a
nice touch, as if the entire passage weren’t built on
metaphors and supposition.) In all, this writing style isn’t
a good way to achieve Žižek’s goal of
distinguishing “Theory proper” from “its
jargonistic imitation” (FRT, 5).

What makes people think that Žižek writes
gracefully, I think, is the casual way he drops in movies,
current event, and homely examples. So this: “These
partial objets petit a are neither subjective nor
objective, but the short-circuit of the two dimensions: the
subjective stain/stand-in that sustains the order of objectivity,
and the objective ‘bone in the throat’ that sustains
subjectivity” (FRT, 65) is followed by: “Does this not
provide the reason why, in so-called caper films…?” (FRT, 66). A stretch of churned mud is softened by a stream of
colorful, if far-fetched, examples.

Cutely illustrating an ontological concept through mundane
instances seems to make for a user-friendly approach. In every
appreciation of Žižek, there is a sentence
somewhere marveling at how his vision sweeps from lofty
abstraction to pop-culture examples. “He takes in subjects
including national cuisines, the Cathar heresy and the literature
and film of the GDR, citing Plato, Hegel, Derrida, Heidegger and
more” (Monroe, “Fright of Real Theory”). But such
potshot erudition is in fact quite easily achieved, as Umberto
Eco showed long ago. If academics are this easily impressed by
name-dropping, no wonder Žižek’s bluffs
find success. And from this standpoint,
Žižek’s claim that correct thought moves
from universal concepts to singular manifestations can be seen to
serve the strategic purpose of justifying his grandiloquent
rhetorical leaps from the sublime to the ridiculous, from
Leninist strictures on violence to anti-smoking legislation.

Finally, I’m left with the question: Why do
Žižek and MacCabe elevate a single anthology
(Post‑Theory) into a movement (Post‑Theory)? The book
has won little attention, and no one else has built it into a
mighty opposite to Lacanian theory. I can only speculate.

My hunch is that both Žižek and MacCabe see
intellectual work as a struggle for power. Recall their
admiration for the likes of Lenin and Mao, note their rhetoric of
enemies and obtuse opposition, and then observe that other
passages suggest that by calling for conceptual and empirical
theorizing, Post‑Theory aligns itself with science. And
science is a threat. After telling us that no quantum physicists
worry about the ontology of what they observe (I suspect this
will depend on what you mean by ontology),
Žižek complains:

The objectivised language of experts and
scientists. . .can no longer be translated into the common
language, available to everyone, but is present in it in the mode
of fetishized formulae that no one really understands, but which
shape our artistic and popular imaginary (Black Hole, Big Bang,
Superstrings, Quantum Oscillations). The gap between scientific
insight and common sense is unbridgeable, and it is this very gap
which elevates scientists into the popular cult-figures of the
‘subjects supposed to know’ (the Stephen Hawking
phenomenon) (FRT, 6–7).

As usual, any few lines of Žižek demand both glossing and
interrogation. He starts by talking about common language, then
shifts to talking about common sense; but the two aren’t the
same. Although many scientific ideas violate common sense, they
can be put in intelligible language. Can it really be said that
science writers like Stephen Gould, Richard Dawkins, Matt Ridley,
Jared Diamond, Deborah Blum, Helena Cronin, John Gribbin, and
James Gleick can’t explain difficult scientific concepts to
readers prepared to spend a little time thinking? Moreover, given
Žižek’s tortured style, does he seem to have any
regard for writing in a “common language, available to
everyone”? And if it’s wrong for scientists to be
elevated as “subjects supposed to know,” why isn’t
the same stricture applied, say, to Freud and Lacan, who have
become far more Delphic oracles than Einstein or Hawking? Or even
applied to the “popular cult-figure” of the
larger-than-life, I-am-ze-bull European intellectual who says
outrageous things in order to rouse us from our bourgeois
slumber?

Needless to say, Žižek is strategically vague;
his comments evoke attitudes, not arguments. Nor does he mention
that, whatever cult value may attend to scientists in the popular
press, the general public remains remarkably resistant to
scientific findings and scientific thinking. Most Americans
believe in angels and a literal place called Hell. Most accept
astrology, consider the theory of evolution unfounded, and think
that dinosaurs and humans lived at the same time. This state of
affairs, surely related to the class struggle, won’t be
changed by another gloss on the concept of suture.

4 : I can’t
resist adding that Žižek’s third chapter,
devoted to the notion of suture, misses another opportunity.
Instead of recycling confused 1960s and 1970s claims about
point-of-view cutting, he could have attacked the cognitivist
criticisms of suture theory that I float in Narration in the
Fiction Film (Madison, 1985), 110–113.

5 : Ben Brewster
and Lea Jacobs, Theatre to Cinema: Stage Pictorialism and the
Early Feature Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
See the many discussions of 1917 releases in the book, as well as
the analysis of (1919), 133-136. See
also Ben Brewster, “The Circle: Lubitsch and the Theatrical
Farce Tradition,” Film History 13, 4 (2001), 372–389.

9 : I say
idiosyncratic because Žižek says (and he’s
apparently not being playful here): “The basic rule of
dialectics is thus: whenever we are offered a simple enumeration
of subspecies of a universal species, we should always look for
the exception to the series” (27). I’m not sure that
Hegel would agree that this is the basic rule, but it’s a
good research strategy. Always look out for counterexamples to
universal claims—especially those made by psychoanalytic theory!
Remarkably, Žižek goes on: “For example,
it is my conjecture that the key to Hitchcock’s entire opus
[sic] is the film which is integral and at the same time an
exception…. The Trouble with Harry (1954)” (27). Ontology and epistemology, not argued for but rather
illustrated, and by a Hitchcock movie at that: such is the zigzag
of the Žižekian dialectic.

14 :
To be fussily philosophical, if this distinction is true “by
definition” it can only be a deductive truth (which it
obviously isn’t) or a stipulative definition posited by the
speaker. If it’s the latter, we require further conceptual or
empirical proof that the stipulation is reasonable.
Žižek provides none.

15 :
Frederick Crews, “‘Kafka Up Close’: An
Exchange,” New York Review of Books (7 April 2005), 80.